"Campbell, John W Jr - The Space Beyond" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

They ran the oxygen concentration up in celebration, delighted that there was no odor leaking through the plates and the water solution system. A reserve water system was available for use while the main one was cleaned.
And Thrumann grew inspired by his success. He tried using both systems at once. Rapidly the oxygen concentration built up to a dangerously high point, and an over-exhilaration was produced among them. The seven and a half pound limit was reached, for the oxygen supply from the fuel tanks was cut off, and the process stopped. Thrumann set up new apparatus, and collected oxygen from his second apparatus. Three days later he pointed with swelling pride as the pumps forced new oxygen supplies into the fuel tanks. Oxygen stolen from the atmosphere of Jupiter!
Martin deflated him. "We can't burn oxygen though. It's no good without hydrogen."
Thrumann glowered at him, and swore he'd produce that too! "We shall escape! We shall get so much fuel we can escape anyway. There is hydrogen hi this atmosphere-a minute trace, as in all atmospheres, but some. We shall isolate it till we can go!"
"I'm afraid we can't, Karl, even then. The rockets just won't work well, and unless you could isolate your fuels faster than the rockets burn it-"
It was manifestly impossible, so Thrumann returned disconsolate to 'his laboratory. He had hoped for an hour they might break free.
Thrumann was asleep when the last disappointment came. Riley was on the useless watch, and stared somewhat as he noticed the rain start-and it was not rain. Then he thought it was hail, and for some minutes it was. He looked at the thermometer outside, and read with surprise that the temperature had fallen to five degrees blow zero, centigrade. In amazement he looked out- and hi utter astonishment he rose from his seat and glared through the port. Very, very slowly, skating back and forth like a bit of dropped paper, a great, white hexagonal thing dropped gently past the window. It was night, and it shone like a marvelous jewel in the light
of the window. It was two feet across, a thing of wonderful fairy-land beauty. A snowflake, six-sided, wonderful crystal of water. Another dropped into sight, and another. It was snowing heavily in half an hour, and Riley called the others. Flakes as big as dinner plates, all magnificent, perfect hexagons dropped past, all different, all alike. There were always hexagons, but some were like fish-bone patterns, like the vertabrae of a herring, and some were solid pale plates, and some were two crystals united.
It was snowing on Jupiter. And it was colder, noticeably colder.
Day came later, and it was the brightest day they had known, for the air was full of whiteness. And not until then did they notice the air was growing stale and thick in the room. They had been fascinated by this miracle of beauty.
Thrumann guessed the cause instantly. The water in his apparatus was frozen, solid, and the little agitator motor was humming and smoking hot. He shut it off, and looked blankly while the others gathered. "Can't you just set your plates directly in the wall of the ship- wouldn't they pass the oxygen directly that way?" asked
Corliss.
"I tried them that way. They will-till they get clogged with organic products. The water was the best. I can still work that, and I will, for a while. We must heat the water and melt it. Then we can add calcium chloride. That will be all right, because synthium is very inert. But I am afraid. We will see, however. But first-the
flames."
They worked on it, and forgot the miracle of the snow-flakes. The flames roared, and slowly the stubborn apparatus heated, and the water thawed. They had shut off the pipes leading in, and presently the pressure was released on both sides, and the tanks opened. The whole supply of calcium chloride was added to them, when they had been flushed and cleaned, and the stench killed. "The chloride will kill the plant-life forms that have infested the water, and it will be even cleaner now- I hope," said Thrumann.
All day they worked, and the next they finished it,
and the apparatus was ready for working again. They opened the valves, and after a single heavy clank, the pressure came up to normal. Presently clean oxygen was pouring into the room from both machines. Thrumann worked them at full power, anxiously it seemed, and kept the pump working on the one machine that was charging oxygen into the fuel tanks; so much so that the output fell off, as all the oxygen was drained to the other apparatus, Where the pressure on the room side of the plate was less than a tenth of an ounce.
Twenty-two hours later, the snowstorm was still going on, and the biting cold had grown more intense, more unendurable. And twenty-two hours later the apparatus stopped again. The tanks were not frozen this time, the inlet pipes were. Moisture had collected in them, and blocked the flow of gases. They probably had been frozen before, but when the full difference of pressure between Jupiter's atmosphere, and that of the ship rested on it, the ice broke down, naturally. Now there was only the difference of oxygen pressure on them.
They thawed them out this time by sending an electric current through them. But it was getting colder. Thrumann started pumping on both tanks, so that he got the maximum rate of flow, for he knew that soon this would be impossible. It was getting colder.
The snowflakes got smaller, smaller and smaller till they were no larger than flakes on Earth or Mars. But still they drifted in majestic slowness past the window. The beads of moisture on the walls of the ship froze that day. The walls were below freezing. And the men were colder. The heaters were working at full capacity, but Corliss ordered them turned off, and the men put on the electrically heated suits. They could not move about so much now, but it was warm, and they needed less heating power. They had to put heating coils in the water tank.
What happened next came so slowly, they did not realize it at first. The snowflakes were melting slightly on the ship, because it was heated somewhat. They melted and froze, and more came and froze on. It built up a layer over the ports so smooth and transparent that, where nothing but a uniform whiteness was to be seen, they did not notice it at first. Air and all about was white suddenly-and the ship was ice. The oxygen
apparatus was plugged up, and no amount of thawing the tubes would clear them. The ice was outside.
That was how they found the ice. Day after day passed, and the ice remained. A week went by, and the uniform whiteness was all there was outside. Two weeks went by-a month.
Corliss guessed it finally, and ordered a slight trial of the rockets under very low power. There was a sudden explosion, the roar of a ruptured rocket tube. "Turn it off, Martin. It's no good. We're stuck more than ever. I wonder-how thick is it?" He looked out of the port.
"How thick is What?" asked Riley blankly.
"The ice, Ben, the ice. We're the center of a block of ice, and we probably always will be. I think I know what happened. You know we figured that Jupiter was above freezing because the blanket of atmosphere was so deep that the sun's heat and light that got in "as short-wavelength light never got out because it was turned into long-wave heat, and stopped, held prisoner on Jupiter. That keeps the equator and temperate zones warm. We're in the arctic zone. The temperature's forty-two below, centigrade. We were carried here by the air drift probably. And the snow settled and froze on us, and more froze on us, and more, till so thick a shell was formed we sank, due to increase in density. We probably sank till now we're resting on the great polar icesheet. We thought it was just that the snowing kept up. It may have, at that. Probably it stops sometimes. But we're stopped always, because we're stuck on the polar ice sheet, and can't drift away to warmer climates where the rain would melt this ice off. Oh, probably there is some motion of the ice, but too little to do us any good. Maybe in a million years it will reach the tropics again.
"That does not matter. We are here-'forever. The rockets can't melt us out, because they are plugged, and will simply explode, and unless we had an engine more than one hundred percent efficient we can't melt the mass of ice around us with our limited supply of fuel."
"Always-here! No more air-" Martin said it very softly, and sighed. "That engine would have to be more than ten thousand percent efficient, I guess, to get us loose now."
"No-just 101% would be enough-because we would
get back what we started with every time. But there ain't no such animal," said Corliss. And stopped. Because he'd suddenly remembered there was one-a rocket ship I Then he shrugged his shoulders, and sighed, for this rocket ship would never again be even one percent efficient.
"But the air-lines are plugged. We'll never get any more air," protested Martin.
"Martin, there is not one single thing we can do about it. They're plugged. What of it? What good did they ever do? You knew that eventually we'd run out of food, and there always was more air than food."
"It's cold," said Riley. "We'll need a lot of fuel for warmth-if we never get back where it's warm."
"We won't," sighed Corliss. "You can depend on that." There was a resigned hopelessness in his lean, seamed face. "But we've been here a good while now. Can you tell whether or not you can send a radio message?"
"Yes, I can tell-and we can. I've been fussing with the set for days. There being nothing else to do."
Nothing else to do. That was the situation of the Corliss Jupiter Expedition. Days followed days, and merged into months. Thrumann puttered and read and sulked and tried to think of chemical schemes. He converted all the excess paper and cloth into sugar, and ran out of reagents. The men wouldn't touch his results, but he ate it, and seemed to wax fat and happy, or at least fat.
They grew strong. The eternal crushing weight seemed to affect them less as they grew accustomed to it. And the ship was stable now, very stable. It was anchored by unknown millions of tons of ice. The ship had merely served as a nucleus for a gigantic hailstone, and now, here on the floating ice mass in the air, it grew heavier. Day and night grew to have less and less differentiation. The layers of ice, translucent though they were, finally blocked all light, and the ship lay in a mass of dark, light-less ice, with only the glow of her lights showing what lay beyond. The temperature never varied; it hung at forty-two degrees below zero week after week, for they never moved, and Jupiter's air is too massive to change rapidly in temperature as Earth's does.
Riley watched the calendar, and played with the radio, and Corliss watched the calendar, and worried. The six months was rapidly dwindling to a matter of days. There
was nothing they could do about it. The "relief" ship would come. That was inevitable. But they might be able to stop it before it got so far down into the atmosphere that retreat was impossible.
And, deep in Corliss's mind, a single thought began to rankle, the thought that went with those words he had spoken hastily when he first realized they were forever imprisoned in the icy floating continent of Jupiter.
Corliss was sleeping; he woke with difficulty to the shaking of Riley's hand on his shoulder. "Bar-Bar- wake up. Brad's calling."
Corliss sat up with a start. "Brad? Brad's on Gamy-mede!"
"He's not any more. He's on Jupiter," said Riley grimly. Corliss was up in a second. In another he was in the radio room. The speaker was rattling to a human voice for the first time in all the months they had been here. There was the background wash of static;-but there was a human voice.
"Riley-Riley-hey, what's up?"
"O.K., Brad-I went to get Bar. He's here. Now listen. Have you stopped?"
"No, I haven't. I'm going to bring you out somehow. You may have had tough luck but-"
"Brad," said Corliss slowly and calmly, "if you haven't reached the region of storms, turn on all your power, and get out. You haven't a chance, and we know it better than you do. If you have passed the first layers of the storms, fold your wings at once, and let it fall freely til you pass them. You'll hit the thick air, and slow enough to partly open the wings again. Ours ripped off. But go back. The air is denser than water. We've floated in it for months."
The speaker rattled softly as Brad's voice came through. "God," he said aloud, then, "they've gone mad," softly, as though he had turned away from the microphone to speak.
Bar laughed softly. "It won't do any good, I see. You won't believe me. But fold your wings, and you will be that much better off. When you get down, let us know. And watch out for the hydrosphere. It isn't very thick, but it may strain your plates to the breaking point. Close off all barometers, too. They'll explode."
The voice of Brad suddenly became jumpy. They had reached the level of the storms. An order rang out sharply: "Level off, if you can, and shut off the gyroscopes before they break a mounting. Are you using full lift on the wings?" A moment pause. Then: "Good-then take a straight dive. This storm area isn't very deep evidently. And you might cut the wing-lift down, for now."'